Magnificent Vibration by Rick Springfield Read Free Book Online Page A

and the hat, and I swear I did not laugh out loud even when they talked about their sacred skivvies (special underwear that’s supposed to offer protection against evil and temptation), so committed were my little heart and wiener to the hot recruiter I was sure I would see at a gathering at some point. And if I’d been wearing this super-underwear in the first place, I might have been immune to Drac’s religious-sexual come-ons and avoided this whole gonzo sect. But now, even at fifteen, when the seething hormones are pretty much resistant to anything that would knock them off their single-minded course, I am tiring of the chase. I have whacked the monkey almost nightly since I met this Mormon goddess, though I have seen neither angelic hide nor angelic hair of angelic her since. I have a severe rash on my wiener, from overuse of the old liquid soap in the communal bathroom, and a seriously deflated heart. Even at this tender age Woody has a direct line to my affections. I’m in the bathroom so much that my clueless mother is sure I have a terminal case of dysentery.
    And the guilt! I thought the Presbyterians were tough on us chronic masturbators, but the Mormons take it to a whole other level. They refer to it, mainly at church gatherings of boys my age and older, as “the problem,” and drill it into our sexual-fantasy-filled noodles that the wiener is sacred and to be used only for procreation. I’m good with that—just let me begin procreating, then! But in lieu of the actual carnal act, I must resort to spanking frank or my head (and possibly my frank) will explode. Do these old guys who preach against self-stimulation-of-the-pork-sword even remember what it was like to be a teenager? It’s a survival instinct to think of nothing but SEX at this age. From back when we all used to croak at the age of nineteen, eaten by some saber-toothed tiger or other predator with a hankering for the easily caught, upright monkey-thing. “Get a baby into the world before a dinosaur makes you its lunch” is hard-wired into us young males. My brain is screaming to me, “Get laid, motherfucker! You’ll be toast soon.” How does one fight that? Certainly not by thinking of football. Or kneeling piously in teen-prayer. Not that I’ve tried prayer, mind you. I’m usually elbow deep into my third wank of the day before the guilt gets so bad I start to run the alternatives through my mind. Let’s see, “waxing the carrot” one more time or a little meditation and invocation. “Choke Kojak,” yells my reptile brain. So I do.
    And then there is the truly bleak side of my life: my sister, Josie. Never far from my thoughts, except when my thoughts go south to Sexytown.
    At home, she continues her sad downward spiral and hardly ever leaves the house anymore. She showers or bathes three to four times a day and walks around her fortress of a bedroom with her red raw hands still dripping water and soap from the thousandth scalding scrubbing. She touches no one and handles every single thing as though it wereriddled with contagion and vermin. The beautiful soul she once was is disintegrating day by day under the onslaught of her dark demons, and I am impotent to help her. I answer her repetitive questions when I am not at school, at Joe’s church, or going door to door with a “recruiter” so I can learn the difficult craft of increasing the Mormon congregation myself. Our mother is beginning to hint that Josie would do better in a “facility.” I’m not sure what type of “facility” she means, but her tone suggests to me that it wouldn’t be something my sweet girl would be terribly happy about. The three-pronged relationship I have with the female of the species at this point in my life is neither fully understood by nor completely lost on my young mind. (1.) My mother: controlling, shaming, at times loving, lethal (when it comes to dogs), and increasingly less tolerant (when it comes to my father’s infidelities.)